Google Finally Brings Chats and Free Video Hangout to Mobile iOS

Users on iOS devices can finally start using a Google app for Google Chats. Google’s new chat app, appropriately call Hangouts, allows you to do what you’ve always done with Gmail’s desktop experience: text friends, start videos, and share photos in seamless conversations across multiple devices.

Google took note of an important aspect about notifications when creating this app – you only get one alert per new item that’s synced across all of your devices. If your notifications get too noisy, you can turn them off and check back later. Perhaps the company has heard complaints about Google Plus notifications.

The best part about the new Hangout app is how easy it is to continue a video chat from a text chat in seconds. If that feature doesn’t impress you, Google’s also putting in 850 emojis for all of those emotions you can’t express.

There’s no word yet on why Google Voice is not included in the features, but Google should definitely consider bundling them all in one app for ease of use: texts, voice, and videos.

Update: Please note that you will have to use a Google Plus account in order to use this service. Current users of GChat will note that there is not default “off the record” chats for all of your chats. You must turn off the record chat option per chat.